Fastest possible storage on a desktop PC?

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Ozzy_Uk

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Sep 23, 2014
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Hi All
I have been investigating NVMe's and looking at the Intel P3700 1.2Tb PCI-E drive...

can anyone recommend any faster storage for about 1Tb of data on a desktop PC?

has anyone had any direct experience with the P3700 or similar type or storage?

can you run win7 x64 on it? does it work in MDT Build environments for imaging?

thanks
Oz.
 
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Captain_WD
Hey there,

That SSD is indeed one of the top drives on the market. You have to ask the guys here for benchmarks to check if it is actually better and how much compared to others.
If speed is what you are looking for, I would suggest getting a small SSD to put your OS on it and get a couple of 500GB SSDs and put them in RAID0. Benchmarks and tests have proven that OS boot time is not affected almost at all if RAID0 is used on it. If, although you use RAID0 for programs or files that you work with, the speed boost is incredible (almost twice as fast as a single SSD, provided that you use 2 for the RAID; almost 3 times as fast, if you use 3 SSDs; and so on).
Have in mind though that if put in RAID0, if a single SSD fails, all your data...
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Captain_WD

Captain_WD

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Jul 30, 2014
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Hey there,

That SSD is indeed one of the top drives on the market. You have to ask the guys here for benchmarks to check if it is actually better and how much compared to others.
If speed is what you are looking for, I would suggest getting a small SSD to put your OS on it and get a couple of 500GB SSDs and put them in RAID0. Benchmarks and tests have proven that OS boot time is not affected almost at all if RAID0 is used on it. If, although you use RAID0 for programs or files that you work with, the speed boost is incredible (almost twice as fast as a single SSD, provided that you use 2 for the RAID; almost 3 times as fast, if you use 3 SSDs; and so on).
Have in mind though that if put in RAID0, if a single SSD fails, all your data would be lost on all of them and it is much harder to get data off of failed SSD compared to a failed HDD (even for data recovery companies).
I would suggest getting multiple SSDs, putting them in RAID0, getting a separate SSD for the OS and having an external backup of your data in the RAID. This would bring you the most speed and provide you with enough safety.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask if you have any questions,

Captain_WD.
 
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Ozzy_Uk

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Sep 23, 2014
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currently we are running a pair of 1Tb Samsung EVO SSDs in each desktop (with OS on a single 500Gb Samsung EVO SSD), with a SATA 6Gbps Raid card, and a striped raid...
I need to push performance on a significant amount from this as the bottle neck is the 6Gbps Sata controller, so would like to bin it...
quite a few solid state PCI-E cards still have a sata controller on them to manage them NVM, which makes them no good, hence the question about the Intel Cards... thanks.
Oz.
 
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Captain_WD

Captain_WD

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Quite remarkable setups you've got there :)
I believe that there benchmarks comparing SSDs in RAID0 with SATA 6 Gb/s and PCIe (specifically Intel SSDs).
What speeds are you looking for?

Captain_WD.
 
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Ozzy_Uk

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Sep 23, 2014
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just as fast as possible, data security is not important really as data is sync'd with perforce, so backed up elsewhere, its about getting the working set going as fast as possible!

believe the Intel P3700 is rated at 2800mbps vs Samsung evo's at about 520mbps and 450,000iops vs 98,000iops...

that's about a 4 fold performance increase in theory... if we can raid a pair of P3700s even better...

 
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Captain_WD

Captain_WD

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Sadly, I have no observations over PCIe RAIDs. You could try calling Intel and checking if it is possible and how. I would be very interested in benchmarks compared to other drives in RAID. So your top speed at the moment is 6Gb/s (the bottlenecking SATA speed)?
I've seen people talk about future NAND controllers and flash controllers that could replace SATA RAID controllers and boost up the speed significantly. You could look into that.

Captain_WD.
 
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Ozzy_Uk

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Sep 23, 2014
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Thanks, yeah my understanding is the Intel P3700, P3600 and P3500 all bin off the SATA controllers, which provides a significant latency reduction, we are reading thousands of small files repeatedly, so 450,000 IOPS would provide a worthwhile improvement vs SSDs over a SATA controller...
 
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Ozzy_Uk

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Sep 23, 2014
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well at least I have managed to get pricing for P3700 and P3600 out of Scan.co.uk... P3600 is actually close to £1.5 per Gb which is impressive!
I think we will have to take a punt as no one seems to have any real world data on them other than a few online reviews...
 
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